GPS Eye-in-the-Sky Software Takes Closer Look Below

About this technology

Overview

NASA teamed up with NAVSYS Corporation to address the unreliability of GPS surveying in urban environments and the amount of time it took to collect large quantities of data for geographic information systems. Under a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract, NAVSYS developed a tightly-coupled GPS/inertial/video-mapping system that could add precise position and attitude metadata to digital camera images. This system could allow the digital images to be post-processed and the coordinates of objects of interest to be collected, plus high-accuracy GPS/inertial integration algorithms could continue mapping operations through short GPS dropouts, without noticeable performance degradation. The original system developed for NASA was a van-based unit. NAVSYS took this system and developed a smaller airborne version of the product, termed GI-Eye, which was then used to collect aerial mapping data for commercial and military applications.